Lifestyles In The Milieu Of Beating Stubble And Atomic Rubble

June 14, 1986|By Russell Baker, New York Times

The Duke of Windsor shaved twice a day. This sad disclosure comes from the current Vanity Fair, which contains several hundred yards about how the duke and duchess soldiered bravely on in Paris exile with scarcely 20 servants in support.

Three servants spent dinner hours ironing the sheets because the duchess couldn't bear to sleep on a wrinkled bedsheet. She also detested bores.

These antipathies to bores and wrinkled fabrics show how far the duchess had journeyed from her native Baltimore, where bores and wrinkles are as integral to the culture as crabcakes and liars who claim they knew Babe Ruth as a boy.

But I wander from the Duke of Windsor's two shaves a day. Can you imagine how much time he had on his hands? Only a man with nothing to do all day long can become a habitual twice-a-day shaver.

Thing like that could lead to a vicious habit. Hard to control if a fellow got hooked. First, three shaves a day, just now and then. Pretty soon he could have a regular three-shave-a-day habit. Next thing you knew it might be four shaves, five, six shaves a day.

Then what? Interrupting midmorning tea because he just simply had to have another shave.

Dreadfully embarrassing scenes at the end of parties, the guests trying discreetly to leave, and the Duke of Windsor pleading with the women to let the men stay for just one more shave.

He could imagine Wallis' humiliation as he blocked the guests' paths, shaving mug in hand, bleeding from nicks incurred during dinner when he had excused himself and dashed out for those hurried shaves he hoped nobody would notice.

He cringed as he imagined himself crying out to those departing guests, ''Just one little shave for the road, fellows!''

Eventually the duchess would mention it to him. ''It's time you faced the truth, Your Highness. You have a shaving problem.''

The gossip queens would love to get their claws into that, wouldn't they?

''Duke's Shaving Addiction Bared.''

''Shaved in Bed Four Times a Night.''

''Wallis' Cry of Despair: 'Shaving Cream on Quilt Almost as Unbearable as Wrinkled Sheets.' ''

Well, I imagine the duke imagining all this because a man with time on his hands who shaves twice a day has got to do something between those two shaves, and imagining is the easiest thing to do if you have never cultivated the doing habit.

The poor old duke had so much time to kill that he habitually took the second shave and obviously enjoyed it. He had to enjoy it or he wouldn't have put up with the physical irritation involved in scraping your face with sharp steel every 12 hours.

In another part of The Pointlessness of the Life Styles of the Rich and Famous Department, did you notice that Barbara Piasecka Johnson, the pharmaceutical heiress whose right to do as she pleases with $340 million has just been legally established, celebrated her big payday by inviting guests to her Princeton estate? And that under the chapel there is a bomb shelter designed to survive nuclear attack?

Among other things, it holds 10,000 gallons of fuel oil, in case the thermonuclear holocaust sets off an OPEC boycott, I suppose. The shelter has four periscopes.

I imagine the survivors down there awaiting the all-clear. Weeks pass. Nothing to do. Some people start to shave with alarming frequency. Three, four, five shaves a day. The incessant lather makes Johnson want to scream, but she has the power to stop this insane shaving:

''From now on, anyone shaving more than twice a day is forbidden to go to the periscopes and look at the rubble.''